Since we have an article about having fun by creating at #1 right now, I thought this would be a good time to ask: What cool project are you tinkering with this week? Please limit it to things that aren't seeking profit.
It's a a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup or cost. It's also open source if you want to run your own.
ntfy looks great! I love these "do one small thing right" tools in the OSS ecosystem!
A few months back, I was looking for the opposite. A way to bring notifications from my phone onto my laptop. I tend to usually keep my phone in a different room during the workday, and have to keep jumping in everytime I need something like a SMS 2FA or to just check if I have any new notifications. Whatsapp Web+TOTP take a lot of the pain away, but it would still be great to have a way to seamlessly get notifs from phone (Android if it makes building it easier) to laptop (Ideally cross-platform, but Linux). Any idea of any tools that do that?
I just helped a friend connect his iPhone availability polling script to ntfy.sh so it could be run remotely and still notify him when the latest iPhone was available at a nearby Apple store. It worked wonderfully, and now my friend has a new iPhone!
Thanks for making and maintaining such an amazing tool!
I'm interested in making a "chat with yourself" program I'm calling Soliloquy [1].
The idea is to let you explore different sides of an argument, or different sides of your psyche. For example, you might choose the three characters, "optimist", "pessimist" and "judge" to hold a group conversation that looks like a mobile phone chat, as a way to work through a difficult challenge in life that needs reflection and long-form thought.
The reason I'm building this is I find that I often don't complete a thought before negating myself--I cut short embarrassing or superficially trivial feelings, but I believe they sometimes deserve more stage time. Sometimes it's exploring thoughts that relate to uncomfortable feelings that yield the highest return on time spent.
Soliloquy is being built with neutralinojs, so it will work on any desktop OS (Mac/Linux/Window). It is "local only"--no network connection, so you can rest assured your private conversations are your own. I intend to publish it with MIT license but haven't got around to that yet :)
I would be interested in something where I'm given a topic and position to argue for, and I argue against another person who has the opposite side, and then other people vote on who did it best. Obviously a lot of details there to work out to avoid sybil attacks but I think that would be stimulating.
I think you're really on to something there. It's quite along the lines of something I've been practicing the last 18 months or so, particularly not stopping short when uncomfortable feelings come up as I examine an issue or feeling and try gain a proper perspective. It's something I consider part of my own mindfulness techniques, which have really been powerful and profound mental exercises for me. I think something like Soliloquy could really not only help people with the intended goal of the project but even to just expose more people to the very idea of truly exploring things from different vantage points.
How cool, I’ve been wanting to try just such a conversation between two of my characters. I might give this a try!
That conversation will relate to my own project, in which I’ve lost the fun aspect of working on it. There’s something important about doing a thing purely for fun.
https://letsblock.it has been on a slow but steady growth trajectory since it's January ShowHN[1]. The public instance served 290 customized lists this week, and operations / project upkeep are a pretty light time commitment.
It's a companion project to uBlockOrigin, working towards improving the internet's signal/noise ratio by filtering out low-value content and nags. While cosmetic filtering is very powerful, its learning curve is steep, so the project provides customizable templates maintained by the community.
I'll be giving a talk about the project, titled "Designing an Open-Source project for low maintenance" this Thursday at Ory Summit[2] and will share the recording on HN once it's public. You can still watch the conference's live-stream for free!
After that, I'll need to update the website's copy and simplify some UX, to prepare for another visibility push later this year.
Site is intended to be like the book Hacker's Delight, but recast into a game.
Or maybe like professional programming, where you're mostly trying to understand/modify other people's code.
Or maybe like programming in a post-GPT3 world where you're checking/fixing a transformer language model's plagiarized/regurgitated code. Our dystopian future.
Later this week I'll add a Hash Treap puzzle (the fastest and simplest balanced binary tree) following up on the reroot and remove-root puzzles (amazing little algorithms that allow treap insertion and removal, top-down, no rotations).
I'll launch the site properly once I have enough puzzles, maybe early next year.
It's a personal project, but completely free and without ads, (in the future I want to open source parts of it!).
The idea is to solve the problem that boards have out there that just puts everything as "worldwide" and in the end, it's not available for me as a Brazilian.
The time spent researching job boards it was easier to make a crawler. In the end I got a job.
Right now just want to focus on it being complete as possible, so there are a few bugs and some listing that slips.
It's a free tool to read & review research papers together with your colleagues. You can annotate, draw and comment on papers you upload. It's a tool that I wish I had when I was doing my research and super excited to finally work on it!
Please don't follow what Polar did to their project. I hadn't used it for a year or so, went back to use it, they had upgraded to a SaaS model (online account required) so I couldn't access my highlighted notes. I swear they were open source from the get-go, but the community has seemed to die down now.
Piano Gym is a learning and practice ecosystem focused on prioritizing music theory and performance skills acquisition through the use of flash cards. We use flash cards in order to pair them with modern learning techniques like spaced repetition, graded feedback, and progress tracking so that you can practice material and work through content that is managed by Piano Gym, and all you have to do is enroll in a school/course/lesson and do your reps! Just show up every day and do 15 minutes of reviews. You're going to make progress.
The website uses the Piano to navigate exercises as well as regular keyboard/mouse input. It works on browser technology and I'm looking to eventually make it mobile devices.
It provides content creation for everyone so that anyone can make their own schools/courses/lessons and the best part is each school gets its own landing page.
My goal is to do this for free. I believe that no one should be blocked from learning. And one of the issues with this at the moment is that it's just me currently working nights and weekends to make this happen.
This looks incredible and very similar to an idea that I was kicking around a while back. Please email me (see profile). I'd love to contribute to this.
In particular, something that would widen access to this platform is a microphone-based input method for acoustic pianos. There are only a couple of commercial platforms that have this and AFAIK, no completely free ones have it. There are some challenges of course -- out of tune pianos, different types and makes and models sound different, variations in how the piano is mic'd, etc., but I believe those can be worked around and have some ideas about how to make it happen.
I spent some of my free time learning how to work with Emscripten. So far, as an output, I have tiny sample files that can be used to start new projects:
Stictionary[1] is my free, no-ads, offline dictionary that remembers the words you look up. It gives words of the day and flash cards for words you have looked up before.
I built it after years of manually tracking words i looked up in hopes that i'd retain them better. After having it on my phone for months, i can say it works great.
I'm a C++ dev, but wanted to learn js/typescript/tailwind in case I'll want to switch job/stack.
Started with the simplest project possible that I wanted to do https://www.jjson.me - just a json formatter as a static website hosted on Github & Cloudflare
Learned to tinker div blocks, callbacks, css classes)))
Now planning to create something simple but with a server and database involved, hope it'll work out
I'm working on the second part of my Nerf Dart Missile Defense system project [0].
Building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air has a lot of interesting technical challenges so it's a fun project :) I also get to learn a lot about the process of making videos.
The second part was almost ready a few months ago, but then I had to redo a lot of stuff and I lost steam for a bit.
Hopefully I'll have a second (more well-put-together) video out soon!
I am publishing a newsletter about Ruby https://newsletter.shortruby.com, and I am trying to automate part of my process to focus more on curating the content.
My process looks like this:
1. I have a list of tweets and Reddit posts that I gather during the week. This list is sending self-DMs on Twitter or Telegram
2. I have a Ruby on Rails app that will read the tweets and posts and will save them in the local DB
3. I browse the list of things, and I have a simple button, "Hide" that I press to remove what I don't want to include
4. Now comes the more manual part
4.1 I click to open each Tweet (mostly) or Reddit post and then I take a screenshot of that Tweet
4.2 Then I transform the screenshot (like resize) to fit the Substack (my newsletter is hosted there)
4.3 Then I drag and drop the screenshot in Substack, and I add a caption (where I specify the source) and alt for the image
So far, I managed to write an apple script that automated 4.2, but I am trying to find a way to take the screenshot automatically so I am playing a bit with headless browsers.
Enjoy the time with your little one. They’ll soon grow up before you know it and then you’ll get time back for tinkering, but by then will miss the time you had with your first born.
1) I used to be an energy engineer, so I'm taking some of the most common energy saving calculations I used to do and making a python library of them. And then maybe a quick flask calculator to show the energy saving methods and how much energy they save
2) Trying to learn the basics of font making so I can make a font based on the golden ratio, mostly for personal use
Baby Buddy[0] just turned five and I’m still hacking away on it! Well mostly reviewing PRs and helping contributors. I get a great deal of enjoyment out of interacting with its users and contributors.
I'm working on improving the https://UnifiedPush.org explainer with more fancy CSS animations this weekend. Also improving the ntfy integration in matrix-docker-ansible-deploy (an ansible playbook to easily host a Matrix server).
Currently trying to work out why glyph heights are the same on all platforms except MacOS in LibreOffice.
I suspect I will be writing a utility to look at each font's glyphs and metrics. Funnily enough, MacOS is literally off by 1 pixel from every other platform in terms of glyph bounding box height.
I’ve been having tons of fun messing around using the depth sensor data from a Kinect for Xbox to create procedural visuals.
It’s been growing and growing to the point of now having 4 or 5 different input methods and accidentally discovering new emergent effects based on different combinations of parameters.
Also threw in intel’s 3D rendering engine Embree because why not.
Anyways, this playlist documents the progress in chronological order...
[+] [-] binwiederhier|3 years ago|reply
It's a a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup or cost. It's also open source if you want to run your own.
You can use it like this (more in the docs: https://ntfy.sh/docs/):
It's 100% not-for-profit and always-just-for-fun.[+] [-] madmax108|3 years ago|reply
A few months back, I was looking for the opposite. A way to bring notifications from my phone onto my laptop. I tend to usually keep my phone in a different room during the workday, and have to keep jumping in everytime I need something like a SMS 2FA or to just check if I have any new notifications. Whatsapp Web+TOTP take a lot of the pain away, but it would still be great to have a way to seamlessly get notifs from phone (Android if it makes building it easier) to laptop (Ideally cross-platform, but Linux). Any idea of any tools that do that?
[+] [-] arjvik|3 years ago|reply
I just helped a friend connect his iPhone availability polling script to ntfy.sh so it could be run remotely and still notify him when the latest iPhone was available at a nearby Apple store. It worked wonderfully, and now my friend has a new iPhone!
Thanks for making and maintaining such an amazing tool!
[+] [-] londons_explore|3 years ago|reply
If you do use the Google/apple push notifications, who pays the bill for those?
[+] [-] vosper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NegativeLatency|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bongobingo1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rounakdatta|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canadaduane|3 years ago|reply
The idea is to let you explore different sides of an argument, or different sides of your psyche. For example, you might choose the three characters, "optimist", "pessimist" and "judge" to hold a group conversation that looks like a mobile phone chat, as a way to work through a difficult challenge in life that needs reflection and long-form thought.
The reason I'm building this is I find that I often don't complete a thought before negating myself--I cut short embarrassing or superficially trivial feelings, but I believe they sometimes deserve more stage time. Sometimes it's exploring thoughts that relate to uncomfortable feelings that yield the highest return on time spent.
Soliloquy is being built with neutralinojs, so it will work on any desktop OS (Mac/Linux/Window). It is "local only"--no network connection, so you can rest assured your private conversations are your own. I intend to publish it with MIT license but haven't got around to that yet :)
[1] https://github.com/canadaduane/soliloquy
[+] [-] seibelj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milsorgen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EarthLaunch|3 years ago|reply
That conversation will relate to my own project, in which I’ve lost the fun aspect of working on it. There’s something important about doing a thing purely for fun.
[+] [-] metadat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Diapason|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nprateem|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvello|3 years ago|reply
It's a companion project to uBlockOrigin, working towards improving the internet's signal/noise ratio by filtering out low-value content and nags. While cosmetic filtering is very powerful, its learning curve is steep, so the project provides customizable templates maintained by the community.
I'll be giving a talk about the project, titled "Designing an Open-Source project for low maintenance" this Thursday at Ory Summit[2] and will share the recording on HN once it's public. You can still watch the conference's live-stream for free!
After that, I'll need to update the website's copy and simplify some UX, to prepare for another visibility push later this year.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057442
[2]: https://ory-events.vercel.app/
[+] [-] infogulch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bugfix-66|3 years ago|reply
Site is intended to be like the book Hacker's Delight, but recast into a game.
Or maybe like professional programming, where you're mostly trying to understand/modify other people's code.
Or maybe like programming in a post-GPT3 world where you're checking/fixing a transformer language model's plagiarized/regurgitated code. Our dystopian future.
Later this week I'll add a Hash Treap puzzle (the fastest and simplest balanced binary tree) following up on the reroot and remove-root puzzles (amazing little algorithms that allow treap insertion and removal, top-down, no rotations).
I'll launch the site properly once I have enough puzzles, maybe early next year.
[+] [-] metadat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jampa|3 years ago|reply
I decided now to put an interface on it and make it a website.
https://jsniffer.com/
It's a personal project, but completely free and without ads, (in the future I want to open source parts of it!).
The idea is to solve the problem that boards have out there that just puts everything as "worldwide" and in the end, it's not available for me as a Brazilian.
The time spent researching job boards it was easier to make a crawler. In the end I got a job.
Right now just want to focus on it being complete as possible, so there are a few bugs and some listing that slips.
[+] [-] sideproject|3 years ago|reply
https://www.scholars.io
It's a free tool to read & review research papers together with your colleagues. You can annotate, draw and comment on papers you upload. It's a tool that I wish I had when I was doing my research and super excited to finally work on it!
[+] [-] leovander|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PianoGym|3 years ago|reply
Here's a quick video explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faxNDhOjlh4
Piano Gym is a learning and practice ecosystem focused on prioritizing music theory and performance skills acquisition through the use of flash cards. We use flash cards in order to pair them with modern learning techniques like spaced repetition, graded feedback, and progress tracking so that you can practice material and work through content that is managed by Piano Gym, and all you have to do is enroll in a school/course/lesson and do your reps! Just show up every day and do 15 minutes of reviews. You're going to make progress.
The website uses the Piano to navigate exercises as well as regular keyboard/mouse input. It works on browser technology and I'm looking to eventually make it mobile devices.
It provides content creation for everyone so that anyone can make their own schools/courses/lessons and the best part is each school gets its own landing page.
For example I'm using the methods book from https://freepianomethod.com which is provided by Mayron Cole, and if you wanted to practice it without signing up or enrolling you could easily visit this link: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method
Even better when you find the piece you want to practice you can share it directly like so: https://pianogym.com/schools/Mayron%20Cole%20Method?sheet_mu...
My goal is to do this for free. I believe that no one should be blocked from learning. And one of the issues with this at the moment is that it's just me currently working nights and weekends to make this happen.
[+] [-] cweagans|3 years ago|reply
In particular, something that would widen access to this platform is a microphone-based input method for acoustic pianos. There are only a couple of commercial platforms that have this and AFAIK, no completely free ones have it. There are some challenges of course -- out of tune pianos, different types and makes and models sound different, variations in how the piano is mic'd, etc., but I believe those can be worked around and have some ideas about how to make it happen.
[+] [-] zackpollard|3 years ago|reply
It's got a way to go to be a full replacement but it's already got a lot of the features and can handle huge amounts of images and videos.
It's fully open source and not for profit, if you also don't like our Google overlords having all your data, give it a try!
[+] [-] midoridensha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artdigital|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antoineMoPa|3 years ago|reply
- https://github.com/antoineMoPa/emscripten-sdl-sample-code
- https://github.com/antoineMoPa/emscripten-webgl-sample-code
I think the next step is to try doing the same with Rust.
[+] [-] liquidise|3 years ago|reply
I built it after years of manually tracking words i looked up in hopes that i'd retain them better. After having it on my phone for months, i can say it works great.
1: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stictionary/id1613214660
[+] [-] Moldoteck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vpanyam|3 years ago|reply
Building a robot that can track nerf darts and shoot them out of the air has a lot of interesting technical challenges so it's a fun project :) I also get to learn a lot about the process of making videos.
The second part was almost ready a few months ago, but then I had to redo a lot of stuff and I lost steam for a bit.
Hopefully I'll have a second (more well-put-together) video out soon!
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF-f_AdCxl0
[+] [-] derwiki|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codazoda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gls2ro|3 years ago|reply
My process looks like this:
1. I have a list of tweets and Reddit posts that I gather during the week. This list is sending self-DMs on Twitter or Telegram 2. I have a Ruby on Rails app that will read the tweets and posts and will save them in the local DB 3. I browse the list of things, and I have a simple button, "Hide" that I press to remove what I don't want to include 4. Now comes the more manual part
4.1 I click to open each Tweet (mostly) or Reddit post and then I take a screenshot of that Tweet 4.2 Then I transform the screenshot (like resize) to fit the Substack (my newsletter is hosted there) 4.3 Then I drag and drop the screenshot in Substack, and I add a caption (where I specify the source) and alt for the image
So far, I managed to write an apple script that automated 4.2, but I am trying to find a way to take the screenshot automatically so I am playing a bit with headless browsers.
[+] [-] xupybd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benrmatthews|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totemandtoken|3 years ago|reply
1) I used to be an energy engineer, so I'm taking some of the most common energy saving calculations I used to do and making a python library of them. And then maybe a quick flask calculator to show the energy saving methods and how much energy they save
2) Trying to learn the basics of font making so I can make a font based on the golden ratio, mostly for personal use
[+] [-] WrtCdEvrydy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cdubzzz|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy
[+] [-] frogpelt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmanyaahm|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris_wot|3 years ago|reply
I suspect I will be writing a utility to look at each font's glyphs and metrics. Funnily enough, MacOS is literally off by 1 pixel from every other platform in terms of glyph bounding box height.
[+] [-] tristanc|3 years ago|reply
It’s been growing and growing to the point of now having 4 or 5 different input methods and accidentally discovering new emergent effects based on different combinations of parameters.
Also threw in intel’s 3D rendering engine Embree because why not.
Anyways, this playlist documents the progress in chronological order...
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvzGE7O7DizdvCEOrwaVNcY_o...